My parents are leaving tonight for a stint in Provo: they are attending a family history conference in Provo and will be gone tonight, tomorrow night, and pretty much all of Saturday. They aren't gone yet, but they will shut the rather squeaky back door behind them any second now. As a girl who enjoys peace, quiet, and a good deal of time alone, I'm looking forward to solitude. In fact, there is no way to duplicate the phhh sound I made with my lips over dinner this evening every time they mentioned they thought I might be scared or lonely or some other similar, related (equally silly) emotion while I spent this weekend by myself.
They seem to have forgotten the following: I will not be spending much of tomorrow, if any, alone. After all, I do work for a living these days. It means I leave the house at 7:40 in the morning, embark on-and disembark from--a bus, enter an office at 8, spend the day there until 5, hop another bus home . . . that kills my day till just before 6. And tomorrow there is a South Davis area singles ward activity I'm debating attending. If I don't attend that, I've got a Gilmore marathon in the works. Complete with Chinese food and Cadbury mini eggs. I won't be lonely. Rory and Lorelai are excellent company.
Tonight will be my solitary night, but I'm perfectly okay being in the company of nobody-but-myself. It gives me time to think. And if you haven't noticed, time to think is a commodity that I enjoy. Besides, I have a task on my hands. Not a big one. But I'm twenty-three and my mom has no faith in my memory, so the house is peppered with yellow Post-It notes for things she thinks I should remember while they're gone: to set my alarm clock, to lock the front door tomorrow when I leave the house. Pull two packages of hamburger down from the freezer. Open the blinds in the morning. Close the blinds at night. Do my Pilates. Walk on the treadmill. Clean the bathroom . . . I watched her post them all, knowing that I would take a quick tour through the house when she left, filing them into memory as I pull them down (I might leave the hamburge note up--she wants me to do it on Saturday, and it's the only thing I'm liable to forget; everything else she posted is something that is a matter of habit).
I had an eery feeling as I watched her post them around the house before she left: the strange sensation that someday, twenty years or more from now, I will walk around a house doing the same thing when I leave for a weekend . . .
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